Iteratively

Iteratively was a Seattle, Washington-based software company selling a SaaS tool that helped data and product teams define, instrument and verify their analytics tracking. The product provided a collaborative environment intended to create a single source of truth for analytics requirements, replacing handoffs conducted via JIRA tickets, Confluence pages, wikis or spreadsheets between data producers and data consumers. It combined a web UI where data analysts and product managers could define and evolve a tracking plan with developer tooling for engineers, including type-safe open-source SDKs, a command-line interface and CI/CD integration, so that data quality problems could be caught before reaching production.

The company focused on event streaming data used for product and marketing analytics — the type of data that flows into tools such as Mixpanel, Amplitude and Segment — and also integrated with dbt and other third-party analytics systems. Iteratively sat at the point of data origin, for example inside an application, validating payloads through its client-side SDK and routing them to whichever third-party destination the customer used; company data did not pass through Iteratively's own servers, and the CEO stated the company did not see customer data, though he acknowledged some metadata and observability processing might be added over time.

Iteratively was later acquired by the product analytics company Amplitude, which positioned the technology within its "Digital Optimization System" as a data management capability and hosted a webinar with Iteratively's co-founders to explain the combined offering.

Founding story

Patrick Thompson began working on Iteratively about two years before February 2021. He had previously worked at Atlassian and at Syncplicity, where he met co-founder Ondrej Hrebicek; Syncplicity was Hrebicek's first startup and was acquired by EMC. The team spent roughly six months on customer discovery, interviewing companies that had built internal solutions for data quality, a problem Thompson had also encountered while building such a tool at Atlassian, and concluded that companies did not trust the data they captured.

Business model

Iteratively sold a SaaS product to data and product teams. Because the company did not process customer data itself, it charged customers by seat rather than by event volume, though the CEO indicated pricing could change if the company began doing data processing on its side.

Per-seat SaaS subscription pricing, rather than usage- or event-volume-based pricing.

Traction

About 10 employees as of February 2021, with plans to grow to 20 by the end of that year. Disclosed customers included Box, Beekeeper, thredUP, Dribbble and Artifact Uprising.

Latest developments

Iteratively was acquired by Amplitude, which integrated the company's data management capabilities into its Digital Optimization System; Amplitude's EVP of Product published a post on the acquisition and the Iteratively co-founders joined an Amplitude webinar on data quality.